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If you look at the actual costs they are going to be similar between the US and NZ, it is a global market for medical supplies and doctors. The difference is who pays

Example:angioplasty with 2 stents (heart surgery): $17,000-$20,000This is rarely done as elective surgery through a private hospital, so although the operation would cost that much to perform, it would paid by the district health board. Last time my father had this done the doctors were discussing during the op if they should ask for a refund from the manufacturer of the stent that didn't work.

Let's compare the price paid for cancer treatment, what would 12.5 months of hospital stays, chemo, painkillers, a nurse visiting your home everyday for a month (plus 2 months of less frequent visits), multiple doctors visits to your home (with 2 doctors so you can get an instant second opinion) cost in the US? In NZ the out of pocket payment was $2 to fill a proscription for 1,000 paracetamol tablets.

Openstreetmap has my address but thinks I am in a different province, but then again so does accuweather (I wonder who uses who as the source).

Google maps on the other hand have my driveway marked as a road and the actual road not existing (well the satelite photos are at least 8 years old), also the have labeled the village with the name of a hotel (which closed and moved away years ago) instead of the real and completely different name, I guess the hotel having "village" in its name was the problem there.

Can someone please explain to me why you would want that interface on a server, the last company that I worked for "upgraded" the RDP server from 2K3 to 2012, it was the most painful experience of my life and I once had a root canal done with no pain killers.

Or just negotiate your salary based on 37.5 hours a week and get paid for overtime, public holidays, on call standby, on call callouts (minimum 4 hours per call out). If the company wants you to do work there must be some value in it for them, which means there should be something in it for you.

By the way the above example isn't in Europe and one person did manage to combine all of the above to claim 26 hours pay for 1 day.

I remember in my first year at university a chem lecturer setting off an explosion in one of the lecture theaters, I was in another room at the time, the entire concrete building shook and four fire trucks turned up.

The problem was the guy hired to write the awk scripts decided to use perl instead and half way through his cat rolled on the keyboard and he couldn't tell which parts were written by him and which by the cat so he left it all in. The battery controller must be using the cat code.

In New Zealand it is (or at least was) 24 hours without the phone = 1 months free line rental. I know of at least one power company in New Zealand that has to pay out $50 to each affected customer if an outage on their network lasts more than 4 hours. Both of these are for residential connections.

The first DVD player we brought for my father (a Phillips) when you opened the box there was a piece of paper sitting on top of saying how to turn off the region checking.

The first DVD player I brought for myself I was comparing two very similar players at about the same price, the salesman walked over and said "you want that one, it comes region unlocked out of the box, the other one you have to look up the code online"

The unlocked one was the cheaper one by the way, still works to this day.

Your right not the best example, but the first one that came into my head when I was thinking about how old e-mails saved my butt.

All my e-mails are archived on a specific archive server and can be retrieved by those with the required access should I get hit by a bus tomorrow, and I don't take it personally I have used the same reason for getting people to learn all of the things that are sitting inside my head. The company that I work for has nicely organised shared drives where nothing is ever deleted (and if it is there are tested tape backups) but as is always the case, things that have been done are always better documented than things that haven't been done. where do you store a "customer has told about this problem but ignored it" conversation that everyone can see (really I would like to know it is the only thing that is falling through the cracks).

I am glad that I don't work for $BIG_CORP, I have all of the e-mails I have ever sent or received from a customer store in a folder for that customer (my inbox is in effect my to do list, the only e-mails in there are ones I have to respond to, either by reply or by doing work if they are from one of the work tracking systems.

The reason I do this is for the following situation, this is an actual example, names have been removed to protect the guilty.

1. I discover a bug in the minor piece of software that I develop where a common mistake in data input can result in a customer not being billed correctly. I trace the history of the bug and notify all affected customers that the bug exists, the conditions that it occurs under and why it is going to affect all of them (the input is a file coming from a source they all share) and that the fix is free as per their support contract.2. All but one of the affected customers ask for the fix straight away, the other says they don't think it is important so they don't want it.3. Fast forward one year customer who doesn't get the fix realises that their bills are coming out wrong, raises all sorts of hell with my boss about the buggy software that they are using, I forward their e-mail saying that they don't want the fix and suddenly they go very quiet.

Without my e-mail history it would be my word against theirs. Finally almost all of my projects last longer than 90 days, how do you keep track of what was agreed (most importantly agreed to be excluded) at the start if all the e-mail trails are gone.

I am left wondering what dodgy things $BIG_CORP are up to if they think e-mails over 90 days old are a legal risk.

You don't even have to nationalise it, just force the owners of the companies to split into two companies, one owning the network and the other selling services on the network with the requirement that the network has to sell access to any company at the same price.

You can also use a carrot for this, see Telecom NZ which split off its fixed line network into a company called Chorus in return for ~$1B, on the condition that it (Chorus who got the money) build an open access fibre network to ~65% of the population within 10 years. I guess in this case the stick in this case was the Government saying if you don't do it we will give the money to someone else and they can build there own network, with blackjack and hookers.

So you are treating them like PADDs from TNG? Do your trainees get one for each document so that can carry around a pile?

I am joking of course, but this is the perfect use for tablets and like you said it saves money (and space). I know of other companies which have done similar things, but since it was board reports for the board members they were using iPads, but part of their justification was they could just e-mail all the documents when they were ready and the board members could read them ahead of time instead of sending out massive piles of paper each month.